Fury
by Renatus
Summary: A group of nine take on elemental power to face a self-serving, righteous Beast – and spend the following ages guarding the world from the remnants of its corrupting power.


A group of nine take on elemental power to face a self-serving, righteous Beast – and spend the following ages guarding the world from the remnants of its corrupting power.

**Fury**

By: Renatus

ooo

When Harry first transformed into his other form, he was thirteen years old - two years younger than his father had been - and looked nothing like his father's shape. Instead of an adolescent deer with the beginnings of a majestic rack of horns, Harry was a spindly, red-furred fox with bright green eyes and not a hair of white on him.

"It is not so strange," Hermione said, running her fingers along Harry's furry spine. He arched under the touch, his muscles twitching in contented pleasure at the petting. "You may look like your father, but you've your mother in you, too."

Hermione's fingers found a particularly lovely spot on his spine just before his tail and she scratched, nearly causing fox-Harry to purr. As it was, a low sort of hum bubbled out of his throat making the girl chuckle.

If Harry's fur wasn't already red, he was sure that she'd be able to see him blush.

Instead, happy little sparks of fire danced down the length of his tail like contended sparklers.

ooo

It wasn't long after Harry's mastery that others followed him and over the course of years, one by one, his friends shared in his pleasure of transformation, of the power and freedom that sang through their veins in exultation.

Hermione was first, of course, and her shape was both a surprise and very fitting. With fur so pale as too be almost white and a wild mane of darker hair, the long-legged horse tossed her head as Harry reached out to her nose. She wasn't very large, but she still had a coltish look that revealed her adolescence. Harry met big brown eyes with his own brilliant ones and finally rested his palm on the velvet nose of his friend.

She huffed and stamped her hooved foot, but settled as Harry ran another hand down her flank, feeling powerful muscles ripple under his fingers.

"Beautiful, Mione," he whispered. She tossed her head in obvious pride and he laughed, delighted.

ooo

In the middle of the Forbidden Forest, under a nearly full moon, ran three furred creatures, their eyes glowing in the moonlight and intent upon their destination, on their escape. They had little time and their mad dash amongst the trees took almost all of their concentration. Two were large, their hooves thundering dimly against the padded forest floor. As they passed through the streaks of moonlight coming through the bare winter canopy, their fur lit up, pale white and sleek or a shaggy brown.

Above their heads, dashing along the branches of the intertwined trees, ran a red-furred fox, many times smaller than its companions but no slower for its size.

Harry's focus was largely on his maddening sprint across the trees, but his eyes flickered often to the two creatures stampeding below him. One was sleek and pale, leading the way through the trees as if she were a native unicorn, but there was no glittering horn on her head, just a wild, fluttering mass of mane, a hint darker than her light body. Hot on her heals huffed a burly, shaggy shape, an ox with fast-expanding curved horns that hugged his skull and scratched at the trees. Despite the more boxy shape, the ox kept pace with the horse in front of him, though he made a great deal more noise in doing so.

Harry's feet, in contrast, were silent as he ran across the trees over their heads.

Somewhere behind them chased a group of bone-masked, dark-robed figures, their wands lit with red light.

ooo

In the last days, the trio were not alone, but they were separated. As Harry delved into dark caverns and slunk through shadowed alleys, his friends recruited. Ron edged close to the school and one of the sources of their allies, students trapped within by a dark regime. On the outside, Hermione contacted old rivals and foreign aid, and found success.

In the shadows of war, Harry cultivated a secret and unexpected ally, and he watched as the boy shifted into a pale-furred shape with a masked band across its face and a long ringed tail.

The coon would not submit to Harry's hand, snapping at his fingers upon his one attempt, but Harry settled back on his heels, satisfied just the same.

The raccoon copied his movements and spent some time relishing in the power that was felt with the transformation, in the freedom that came with the change, inspecting the new, furred form that gave it all to him. He was no larger than the red fox, though sat squatter and did not have the same sleek appearance.

The coon looked back at Harry with silver eyes that glinted like iced steel.

ooo

"It took some explaining," Hermione told Harry through the mirror, her eyes canting somewhere out of his limited range of view, though even with her looking away Harry could see the flickering of power in them. "But once they fully understood the consequences of this transformation I let them have it."

"Them?" Harry asked, curious and wary.

Hermione nodded with a very self-satisfied look on her face. "Them."

Harry was silent for a long minute, hearing vague sounds of movement and shuffling from through the mirror. "Let me see them."

Hermione's smug smile morphed into a smirk and she turned the mirror so that it caught the sight of the two transformed creatures.

One was a bulky, dark-haired creature that hunched over powerful forearms and stared straight back at the mirror with equally dark eyes. The second, and wrapped around the gorilla's neck, was an unnaturally large, formless thing with pale, pearly skin. Somewhere amongst the mass of flesh two light blue eyes caught his and he recognized her as if having felt her presence even through the distance of the mirrors.

"Fleur," Harry whispered.

Harry gazed upon them with a rising sense of satisfaction.

ooo

There were nine of them, in the end, who faced the transformed, twisted creature that He had become. Surrounding the monstrous, many-tailed beast were ringed other, much smaller creatures, transformed by elemental power, united by cause.

Harry remembered their shapes, could remember them forever after, but his memory of their faces before they had transformed often left him or trickled back again at odd moments. But as he faced the pale Beast, he knew them, he always remembered that, and he trusted them, though he wouldn't trust again for a very long time.

The Final Battle was devastating.

Harry would remember the damage and the sense of loss, always.

He refused to remember who caused it - the memory buried beneath his own power, deep into the darkness of his own being, guarded by his fury and hatred - but he would always remember the explosion that tossed them all across the earth, scattering them, and decimating all in between them, mutating the land, changing what life it did not kill and trapping them in the forms they had taken, chaining them to the power that they had grasped hold of in order to save the world.

When Harry made it back to the sight of the battle, all that was left was a great crater and a twisted, white tree at its center. Harry sat under the dead bows of that tree, his two red tails swishing in occasional agitation.

He was alone for a long time.

ooo

Harry had warned the people to never touch the tree, to never eat of its rare fruit. He knew the husk of the Beast was in that tree and that His power was contained within it. Power that was corruptible, that was dangerous.

For a very long time, no one did.

But then one woman took of the fruit and ate of it, and her sons were born with a spark of power within them than no one before them had born since the Cataclysm that had altered the earth.

The woman subdued a war, but the fruit corrupted her with its power and despite Harry's attempt to stop her, her borrowed power was just enough to subdue him and cast him away.

But he took her with him, setting her body alight with devastating fire.

When Harry returned to the land, his three tails swished angrily behind him. She was gone, but her sons remained, the spark within them grown larger, netted through their bodies like a spreading web of disease.

As the woman's boys grew Harry knew the world would change again. There would be times, in the many years following, that Harry wondered if he should have reduced them to ashes like their mother.

ooo

Harry and three of his transformed friends stared up at the great, twisting husk of a tree. It had served as jail and reminder and chains for years beyond count, but they could no longer allow its presence. A single blossom on its withered branches trembled in the breeze, as if knowing of their intent.

Harry looked at the three circled around the tree with him. The shaggy ox had gained a tail since he had last seen him, and was even larger than Harry's last memory of his friend. Ron's horns arced in a thick bow across his brow, looking heavy and solid and dangerous. Across from Harry hunched a gorilla shape, fur dark and eyes darker, glowering at the tree, or Harry past it, he could not tell.

To his left, seated carefully and gazing darkly at the tree with mis-matched eyes was a cat of blue-black fur, her tail twitching behind her.

They destroyed the tree in order to forego a repeat of the woman's disobedience and it cost them their lives, again. And again, the blast scattered them, sending them into a period of darkness that they woke from after time.

Harry gained his fourth tail that day and he sat in the midst of the destruction, smug and satisfied.

ooo

The first time Harry was overpowered it was by a dark-haired man with red, ringed eyes.

His blood boiled at the audacity, at the sheer nerve - he had sworn to never be controlled ever again!

His body did not care, and only used Harry's fury to fuel devastating attacks upon the target of his controller's desire. Harry yelled within the confines of his own head as cries of terror rose out the fires his body breathed into life.

Amongst the ashes, when no sounds remained but the crackling of coals and timber, Harry's fury simmered. The man with red eyes stood before him with a satisfied smirk that turned Harry's blood to a raging inferno.

Breaking the control killed him.

Harry rose out of the ashes with another tail, his fury still burning hot, but the man with the red eyes had fled long ago.

ooo

He first heard of the Containment when the beautiful white horse made mention of a great beast, an ox with many tails having been locked away within a man who yearned for its power. Hermione stood near his lounging body, hers no longer so much larger than his as with each death and each tail Harry's body had expanded and grown.

Now he lay across the mouth of a deep cavern, his five tails curling languidly behind him, easily twice her size.

She was not as small as she once had been either, though.

Hermione had experienced deaths and rebirths too and she now sported three tails of her own and had gained horns as well. Harry eyed the new growths atop the horse's head with some interest but was more distracted by her worried tale of their long-ago friend.

"He's been taken by some whelp," she told him, her voice not changed by her shape. "Up north, in some little village on an island. Contained within the brat's body like he were some possessing ghost."

She made a disgusted sort of sound that huffed out of her throat.

Harry's fury had always been happy to rise to the surface and this was no different. His fury burned hot and sizzling through his veins and he hunted the monster down that dared - dared - cage his friend.

Hermione trailed him, furious, but collected in the face of his terribly rage.

The man was good, had learned to borrow Ron's power with remarkable skill, but he could not beat them, not when the powerful ox within him fought against his every attempt at control and containment. Harry tore the body apart and freed his friend.

The ox exploded out of the Containment with a powerful blast, sinking the small island they stood on and sending all three of them to another rebirth.

When Harry returned to the spot, Ron was still there - or back - changed, different. His body was still oxen, but his tails - the five of them - were like the many legged arms of an octopus, trailing idly in the waves that rolled up the beach to play with him. Harry plopped down on the sandy shore next to the great creature, his six tails curled behind him, his paws carefully out of reach of the tide.

Ron's horned head turned to him and Harry could tell the expression for the grateful grin that it was.

ooo

Harry stared down the decrepit little village with disdain and a silent snarl. Beneath him and his waving red tails was an old friend, his great bulk and languidly paddling fins easily keeping them both afloat in the choppy sea.

"Are you sure?" the shelled creature below him asked, his voice hesitant, but his gold-brown eyes bright as he eyed the village.

"Yessss, Nev," Harry hissed out. His tails swished behind him, and he shifted a paw out of the way of the waves that threatened to get him wet.

"They're the ones ravaging the fishing towns?" Neville asked, shifting in order to look up at Harry as the fox crouched on his back, hackles raised and already spitting at the doomed sea-side village. Harry could taste the reek floating out over the waves from it, like a particularly fowl trash heap.

Harry did not answer with words and Neville did not ask again. Instead, the massive sea turtle propelled them forward, his fins and two wide tails slicing through the waves with remarkable ease.

Harry's indignant anger rose up with the tide that Neville's propulsion created and their combined power slammed into the village of greasy bandits in a tsunami of fire and water.

ooo

When Harry decimated the prison pit in the inland mountains he recruited Krum, but mostly because Neville had disappeared in the sea, Ron was far off in the south and Harry didn't want to wait anymore.

The bulky gorilla huffed next to him as Harry tore off the iron gate that topped the dark depths of the prison. Harry could taste the sour darkness, the rabid fear and festering, corrupted excuse of existence's that whatever lifeforms in the pit had wafting up out of it like a poison cloud. Krum huffed through his nostrils, either from the dust or from the stink, Harry didn't know or really care.

"Is disgusting," Krum grouched, his three tails waving behind his bulk.

Harry snarled, peering into the depths of the pit with a disgusted relish. Next to him, the gorilla opened his maw and formed a swirling ball of power, fire and stone that melded into molten, liquid rock.

The gorilla let it drop into the darkness with a satisfied air. Harry followed the power down into the prison, uncaring for the resulting explosion that came when the ball of lava and power struck the bottom of the depths.

Harry rode the power with a fury, his blood boiling as he was immersed in the corruption that festered in the pit. As the gorilla's power exploded under his paws, Harry let loose his own and fire raged through the dark tunnels and caverns, racing through the halls and charring anything that could be burned, leaving nothing but ash and smoke wafting out of the shafts into a darkening sky.

ooo

The gorilla plopped itself down on its haunches and glared mutinously at the red fox lounging across a skeletal metal frame. Remnant ash scattered around the frame of what once may have been a building, but already shoots of sapling trees and a field of bright flowers were peeking up out of the destruction. The massive red fox was juxtaposed against the spring growth, fur dark and red, its slim bulk bowing the steel frame of the building. Below the construct yawned a black pit, still and quiet. The fox's tails waved idly over this bottomless hole, and the faint sound of dripping water echoed out from its depths.

The fox just peered at the gorilla from slitted, lazy eyes, a satisfied sort of smirk curling across his jaws.

"Did you have to?" Krum grouched, eyeing the seven tails that hung languidly from the fox's rump. They waved occasionally, as if caught in a breeze, but the fox's great size would not have been moved by the barely-there breeze that ruffled their fur.

"They deserved it," Harry said and licked his chops, still feeling very self satisfied despite the time it took for him to wake after his last death. His tails swayed, twitched and then stilled again.

"You didn't have to let yourself get caught in it, though," the gorilla said with a huff.

Harry shifted and eyed the massive gorilla, taking in the new tail that was stiff with the creature's anger. Harry didn't think his rebirth had taken long enough for Krum to have gone and found his own so quickly. He turned away from the other, closing his eyes against the sight of the four-tailed gorilla still glaring at him.

"You didn't have to get caught in it, either," Harry said, his voice as grouchy as his friend's.

The gorilla growled grumpily at him but didn't leave or even take a swipe at Harry's tails. Instead the gorilla just tossed a rock down into the dark depths that hung under the fox. It took a long minute before the rock struck stone and they listened to it ricochet across the bottom of the empty shaft. Harry's large ears twitched at the sound.

The seven fox tails were swishing rather stiffly now, belaying Harry's anxiousness at having caught one of the others up in his own raging fury and power.

ooo

Harry earned his eighth tail when he heard that someone had Contained Luna.

Having already ripped apart two would-be controllers of he or his friends, Harry hunted the man down with a fiery vengeance, leaving devastation in his wake. The upstart man had allies, or friends - Harry did not care - who tried to stop him, but their attempts at wielding power were pathetic in the face of Harry's size and fury.

He blasted his own power back at them, laced with the fires of his anger.

Luna, when she had emerged from the destruction of the dank little desert village, gave the waiting fox a lazy smile.

"Thank you, Harry," she said, arching her body as if stretching. Behind her spread a fan of six tails that resembled the fine wings of a dragon fly, brightly colored and delicate. Her body had grown from the tiny little beetle he could barely recall perching atop his nose into a size that nearly rivaled his own.

"Always, Luna," Harry said, and rose to his feet.

He led them away from the destruction and into the desert mountains, his eight tails swaying behind him.

ooo

Harry eyed the two little whelps that wanted to Contain him with mounting disdain. Their attempts were not even admirable. Harry opened his jaws and before the little pests could annoy him further he swallowed the two whole.

Satisfied, Harry curled back atop the abandoned mountain shrine and continued his nap.

ooo

"They gave me a terrible stomach ache," Harry grouched to the raccoon.

The coon sniffed disdainfully at him, his one tail twitching behind his bulk. Harry was still grumpy that he had to regurgitate the two annoying pests, so it understandably took him a minute to realize that while his friend still had only one tail, and thus one rebirth, the raccoon was still nearly the same size as Harry, who had experienced the phenomena more than all of them.

Harry narrowed his eyes at the coon, considering.

"Your power is expanding," Harry said. It was not a question.

The raccoon's head rose another bit and his nose rose higher in the air. Harry, who was still slumped and glowering at the other from between his shoulders, snarled silently.

"Without the need for recklessness, I might add," the coon said snootily.

Harry sat upright, and with his full height, his tall ears easily stood much taller than the raccoon's bulk, something that did not go unnoticed. The raccoon's tail twitched, agitated.

Harry smirked, his eight tails waving behind him in proud satisfaction. It would be a cold day in hell that he let the coon best him.

The raccoon's silver eyes narrowed dangerously and Harry could feel the shift in the other's power as it rose to the surface, gathering in swirling winds that kicked up the sand of the desert around them. Harry matched it, his own hissing across his skin like live fire, snapping at the winds.

Later, Harry would acknowledge that their powerful and destructive spat was rather silly and pointless, but at the time his wayward anger had just seared through his veins in response to the rising show of power from the coon, and Harry wanted only to decimate the upstart little twat and bury him under the sands.

ooo

"Is he even talking to you anymore?" Hermione asked him.

Harry remained silent, slumped bonelessly across the mouth of his most recently claimed resting place, his head down between his paws. The horse stood next to him, her head lowered in order to better reprimand him on his level. Harry happily ignored her. Over their heads rose the buttresses of a copse of towering trees, their leaves golden in the cooling fall air.

"Ginny said that he's been hooting and hollering for years how he managed to best you," Hermione continued, something in her voice disdainful and reprimanding all at once.

Harry's lip curled, the only show of his disdain for the subject matter.

"You are the one who brought Draco in," Hermione commented.

Harry rose his head and snarled viciously at her. The horse reared back, mane and hooves flying in her surprise. She settled quickly though and huffed at him, stamping her hooves into the dirt underfoot.

Harry noticed that she had gained another tail since he last saw her, and she had a new set of horns atop her head. Hermione regarded him in return, no doubt noticing Harry's own new addition, his ninth tail, and his otherwise same blood-red fur and dark rimmed eyes.

"You're looking a little thin, Harry," she quipped.

Harry let out an annoyed huff and settled back on the floor, twitching his nine tails at her in a lazy show of annoyance. Her four tails imitated the gesture.

ooo

Harry hated men with red eyes.

Their nasty habit of wanting to control him made his fury rage within him, heating his mind and blood and making his claws ache to tear them limb from limb.

In the raging inferno of his own furious mind, Harry watched as his body flung his tails across the landscape, uprooting trees and rock into a deep crevice of destruction. Water rushed over his toes, and through the controlling haze laid over his mind Harry screamed out into the world. His power, out of his own control, but fueled by his fury, gathered and expanded out from him, barreling across the landscape and gouging through the forest.

Amidst the tsunami of uprooted trees, river and rock was the little figure of his controller's target. A man with great speed and able to call on power of his own. Harry snarled, knowing the source of the target's power as the fruit of the tree, and wanting to smother it no matter how long it had been since he had destroyed the husk. The little man was still a remnant.

But so was his controller.

In the midst of the destruction and rage the control over his mind snapped and Harry was left only with his fury.

It raged in him, churning through him in agitated waves, but with the red-eyed man's control over him broken, Harry's body stilled, again under his own command. His lips were pulled back in a terrible snarl, and he could feel the vibrations of his own growling rumbling through his chest and his fur was standing straight on end all along his spine. He was utterly still in the wake of the broken control but his tails waved dangerously behind him, uncaringly knocking through trees.

Before him, on the upheaved battlefield, two men faced off without Harry's power to sway the outcome.

He let them, his bright eyes glaring down at the little men, and his tails twitching with every exchange of remnant power between them.

ooo

Harry did not trust the little men with the remnant power. The power was dangerous and it corrupted and he had seen the truth of it over ages. He had personally destroyed many dark breeding grounds of horror where the tree's power - His power - had festered in the flesh of men. Harry could smell such corruption from miles away, it tickling his nose and setting his own fiery power racing through him, raising his fury to the surface until he roared it out into the sky.

So when the little man from the battle stood atop a tree, power sparking beneath his soles, and spoke to him, Harry merely curled his lip at the pest, revealing his sharp teeth.

When the red haired woman chained him within her, Harry howled, taking great gouging swipes at them as she dragged him into a cage.

ooo

Harry spent the entirety of the years in his first living prison snarling at the woman each and every time she dared come to him looking to borrow power from him. She was a remnant too, and she had enough power, he'd give her none of his.

When she stopped coming, after years, Harry slipped from the chained prison of her mind to another plane, and refused to return.

Fleur found him there, lounging across a field of white daisies that glowed under a false sun. There was a strange haze in the air that belayed the falseness of their reality. Harry puffed out at the flowers tickling the tip of his nose and rolled his eyes up to look at the girl staring down at him.

She had chosen to walk here in her old shape, a woman's shape of great beauty. Her face was familiar but out of place after so long in the shape of the pearly slug her transformation had given her. Her silvery hair trailed idly behind her, the endless strands tangled amongst the daisies.

"Where are you Contained?" Fleur asked, her head tilted in question.

Harry growled in annoyance at the reminder and Fleur was quiet for a long time.

"You don't even know where your Container is, do you?" she asked, and then continued over Harry's snarl. "You haven't spoken with him, or listened to him or learned his name. You haven't even helped him -"

Harry shot to his feet with a furious snarl, his lips curled away from his teeth as he chomped them at the girl. Fleur watched him through his fit of spitting rage, undeterred and unmoved in the face of the fox's bloody fury, or the fires of power that raced around her, charring the daisies and kicking her hair up into a wild halo that wafted over the field like low lying clouds or smoke.

When Harry was left heaving, his power licking across the tips of his tails like fairy fire, Fleur spoke again, her voice soothing except that it did little to calm him.

"They are not all corrupted by it."

Harry huffed in disdain and without a single word spoken to his old friend, he stalked back to his living prison.

ooo

Harry's second prison came on the heels of the first and it felt no different at all to him. One red-headed woman shifted into another slip of a girl with the same hair and the same infuriating chains of power that reeked of the husk of the old Beast and its yearning for control.

From his chained prison suspended within her mind and power, Harry glared at the waif as she snapped at him, her red hair rising around her head, and her tone simultaneously demanding and petulant.

Harry ignored her green eyes and the long ago memories of a woman who had given her life to ensure his own.

Harry snarled at the upstart little spitfire and retreated to the other plane. He stamped the stubborn field of daisies into the ground, carefully ensuring he crushed and tore each and every one of them.

ooo

Harry lounged across his trampled field, the air hazy and his mood subdued, like simmering coals.

Next to him sat Ron, the great oxen's eight strange tails slapping occasionally across the ground, swiping daisy petals into the air. Harry's own tails were still, reflecting his current cooled temperament.

Far across the indeterminable distance of the unreal plane, raged a pale beast with a single tail. Harry could hear its high-pitched calls echo through the dreamy haze, his ears twitching with every sound. Even from their distance they could see the creature's fur marked by dark lines that had never been there before, stretching out across its hide like a dark net caught up in its shaggy fur.

The corrupted raccoon blasted apart a mountain, shrieking gleefully into the shimmering air of the plane as dust and rock rained down around it, caught up in its whirlwind of sand and power.

"When I find the one who Contained him and corrupted him, I will shred them into fine confetti and scatter their blood into the sea," Harry said, his voice smoky and dark with promise.

Ron was silent next to him, but Harry could feel the ox's power shift under the creature's skin, wafting around him like a gaseous poison. Around them, the few daisies that Harry had not trampled or shredded wilted under the simmering anger of the eight-tailed ox.

ooo

Harry's very brief escape from his second living prison allowed him to release barely a fraction of his fury. The red-eyed man was back, casting a haze over his mind and Harry hardly cared as he let the man's control call forth his power, forming a roiling ball of fire in his maw. His body flexed under that control, throwing his tails across some unknown village and toppling whole swaths of buildings.

When the control broke suddenly, Harry screamed his hatred to the sky and hunted down the red-eyed bastard who dared try to control him twice. He would shred him into pieces. He would send his power down the bastard's gullet and let it explode within gut. He would bask in the rain of the man's blood and he would chew on his bones.

When the searing chains wrapped around him again, pinning him amongst the trees, Harry's fury peaked. Unable to exact his revenge and desperate to eradicate anything that could cast him out of his own control, Harry struck out at those who dared restrain him from his hunt.

But it was for naught.

Power ripped in half, chained and sealed and caged within his third prison, Harry threw himself against the sealed bars of his cage, snarling and spitting and vowed that he would see the red-eyed man destroyed either by his claw or by his power.

ooo

Completely unaware of the ages-old raging fury sealed within him, a blonde haired newborn slept.

ooo

**Author's Note:** This is either a prologue, or a tangent…


End file.
